Page 16 - Vol. VI #1

People (continued from preceding page)
lier that day. Not that she’d had time to count. Embezzlement, a word with raw edges. Larcenist rhymed with arsonist, which was a firestarter and more fitting, since her act put spark to the dead wood her life had come to resemble.
ther had been. He’d grown a dark beard since they’d seen him last, and shaved his head. There had been a vulnerability about him right from beginning, a kind of flimsiness that his size only sometimes hid. His wife wandered behind, car- rying Michael, their four-year-old, on one hip. They’d been married six years, but the wife re- mained oddly nameless in Alice’s mind. She’d be hard pressed to identify her in a line-up.
And it had happened so quickly. Organically even, because Spinlux needed her to sign a form and she found herself in the human resources guy’s office—Derek, that was the guy—studying his poster of Che Guevara while he got her a cof-
Even now, standing to hug her, Alice couldn’t think of her name. Jan? Jane? Janie.
fee from the break room. It was under the flat- tened gaze of the Marxist revolutionary that she remembered how Derek kept cash cards for the long haul drivers’ fuel and meal expenses, tidy, plastic rectangles of $500 each. In fact, given the calendar, there should be between forty and fifty of the little suckers in his unlocked middle draw- er. She could do the math: $25,000 give or take. Take, take.
Roger flung his arms wide, staring at Rachel, who rolled her eyes. “Is that my sweet little Rachel? Come give your old uncle a little sugar.” He turned to Alice. “She was just a little kid the last time I saw her. God almighty, she’s gorgeous.”
She heard Derek get waylaid in conversation down the hall, and the silence that followed sig- naled that she was alone, just her and the obscene injustice of her unemployed state, like a blob of mucus hawked by the Spinlux god. She’d stood, thinking she’d peek into the hall, but instead walked over and opened his middle drawer. She hefted the stack of cash cards, and a thought started to coalesce, a brilliant idea ignited by desire, fear, and the glossiness of the cards, their wholeness, as if they were complete entities and she was not.
“Yes!” said Lily, jumping up. “That’s exactly what I meant, honey, when I said you were huge. That’s exactly what I meant.”
Which is when she decided to take them and run. Through the office door, down the hall to the back exit, legs shaky, knees like stiff gelatin. And then she was in her car, backing out, whizzing back
“Were you there?” asked Alice, changing the sub- ject. “Did you see him go?” The grandfather had been sick for a long while and yet the moment of death had been a strike in the night, like ninjas breaking in and stealing something very large and unmovable. Thievery. The cash cards were still in her purse. She will use one to pay for dinner for everyone, and her sister and brother will love her, their spouses will laud her in the car ride home. Now that she had put distance between herself and Fort Wayne, the criminal aspect of her actions had dissolved like an effer- vescent tablet in water.
to the duplex to grab Rachel, not letting herself think. It was only when she was fleeing south on I-69 toward Indianapolis that Alice realized how her future no longer felt a dead stick but a weight- ed arrow, valuable and sharp-edged.
“There they are! My sisters!” Roger appeared at the end of the table. A huge man, six eight, three hundred pounds, bigger even than the grandfa-
“I just thought—maybe Lily had let you know he
7
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“Of course not,” said Roger. “How could I be? I live in Las Vegas, if you’ll recall.”
“So you got a boyfriend?” Roger lowered himself heavily into the booth.
“You asking her or me?” Alice sipped the ice-cold vodka. It was faintly metallic, like holding a smooth stone in her mouth. Her brother’s shirt front was like the side of a mountain. She realized Roger was slightly drunk.